CoverNews is one of the hundreds of magazine niche WordPress templates available in the WP repository. According to its download statistics page on WordPress.org, it was downloaded by 100 to 150 users every day in June 2022. From August 2022, the number of downloads increased five/six folds. The template is now downloaded by 500 to 600 users every day. This number can increase in the future if the developer of CoverNews, AF Themes, keeps updating it often. The increasing number of downloads is not the only thing that grabbed our attention. 130+ users have given this theme a rating of 5 out of 5.
Should you use CoverNews on your news website? Does the template have the feature you want your news website to have? Let’s find it out!
The template shows a large message box when the user activates it. The message has links to its documentation, YouTube channel, and blog. It also has two buttons – Install ACF companion and Theme Dashboard and an option to open the starter sites page on the developer’s official website.
The Dashboard has links to the following settings in the WordPress live customizer:
- Theme, footer, widget area.
- Archive, static front page, front page option.
- Color, main banner, header.
The Dashboard page has just eleven links. In the live customizer, you will find many settings that are not listed above.
CoverNews adds these menus in the live customizer – site identity, header image, background image, menu, widgets, homepage settings, options, and custom CSS. Its options menu in the live customizer boasts these settings:
- Preloader, global settings, header, breadcrumbs.
- Sidebar, archive, related posts, latest posts, and footer.
The Global Settings allow users to activate/disable the theme’s preloader feature, change the content layout, and activate lazy loading. In CoverNews, you can enable the full-width content layout or one of these two layouts – content/primary sidebar or primary sidebar/content for the single posts page.
From the Global Settings section, you can alter the date/author display setting and change the date format from WordPress’s default date format to the template’s custom date format. From the header settings, you can activate the date and social menu on the header and also turn on the sticky header feature.
The theme options section lets users activate/disable the featured image on the single post and breadcrumbs on your website. It boasts an option to make the primary sidebar sticky, change the archive layout from the grid layout to full, and turn on related posts. By default, CoverNews shows the latest posts above the footer. This widget shows the most recent posts on your website. You can deactivate the latest posts from the theme options section.
Widgets
WordPress templates may or may not allow you to manage the widgets from the WP live customizer tool. In CoverNews, you don’t have to open the widgets page of the WordPress dashboard to add/remove widgets, as the theme allows you to add widgets to the main sidebar and footer sections from the WP live customizer tool.
Header options
In CoverNews, you can set a 1900 x 600 pixel image as the header’s background picture. You can also enable the overlay/tint effect for the image from the Header options section.
Frontpage options
The front page is attractive and boasts various widgets/sections. The first thing that grabs your attention when you’re on it is the flash story widget that shows the posts on your website in an HTML marquee. How does this module work? This module will show the posts published in a specific category on your website.
To the left side of the flash story label, you will find an animation. You can change this label to something else from the “Frontage” option settings. CoverNews, by default, shows a sidebar homepage. You can deactivate this sidebar or change its position in it.
tagDiv NewsPaper, the best newspaper WordPress theme, adds an “Advertisement” section to the live customizer. From this section, you can manage the sidebar, header, footer, ads, and banners. CoverNews doesn’t have many advertisement-related settings. There’s only a single ad-related setting, and this setting is available in the “front page option” section.
You can add a banner image to the header and link this image to an URL from this section. You can configure the template to show this banner on every page of your website or only on the homepage and add the target="_blank" attribute to the link. Although the template supports header advertisements, you won’t find an option to add JavaScript ad code in the header in the theme settings. To add advertisements to your website, you will have to use a WordPress ad plugin.
The right side of the homepage features a vertical slider. You can manage this slider from the “Frontpage option” section. The template can show the posts from a category of your choice in the slider. It also enables you to change the slider title and turn off the slider. The slider is part of the Main Banner section. You can deactivate the main banner from the “frontpage options” section of the theme.
Below the main banner, CoverNews has a featured posts area. The design of this section is different from that of the “Main banner”. Like the Main Banner section, the featured posts area displays the posts of a certain category. You can turn off this section.
Background image
To set a background image for the entire website, open the “background image” section of CoverNews.
Color
The template ships with two color options – one to change the global site color scheme and another to set the background color for the theme. You can enable dark or light color schemes for your website by changing the “global site color” setting.
Pro version
The pricing of the CoverNews premium edition starts at 59 dollars. In the premium version, you will get more control over the footer and the header. For example, in the free version of this theme, you can only modify the copyright text in the footer, but in its premium/pro version, you can add widgets to the footer. The premium edition of this template supports post advertisements and comes with a video slider widget.
Pros
Homepage options: The homepage is beautiful and has many sections where you can display the posts of your website.
Cons
Single post page is not customizable: The single posts page is the most important page on a WordPress website, according to us. This page is not customizable in CoverNews.
Alternatives to this template:
